As we mentioned in a previous article, Red Hat advocate Greg DeKoenigsberg claimed that due to the much larger amount of code it's contributed, Red Hat is a better open source citizen than Canonical, adding, "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization." A Computerworld blog retorts that that's no insult; and that marketing Linux could be just as important to the cause as contributing code. Updated

Pretty much no other company has put a serious effort on pushing the Linux desktop, so while Ubuntu hasn't succeeded on the corporate world it has helped Linux grow in mind share.

Which is fantastic, if you only care about buzz and winning contests in Google Trends. Hype will only take you so far though and it hasn't exactly meant success in the consumer space either.

They're still relatively newcomers but it will be hard to justify the Ubuntu hype a few years from now. It should be pretty obvious by now that something more than lots of buzz is needed, and in my opinion whoever thinks that things are gonna change significantly and users are gonna flood to Ubuntu (or any other Linux for that matter) is only kidding himself.